Optimal webpage sizes

Absolutely no more than 50K.

MVied

Junior Poster

112 posts since Aug 2008

Reputation Points: 21

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Let me put it this way:

Speed isn't everything. It's the only thing. Your site should instantly respond to a request. If you have to wait 4 seconds until something happens, you are in big trouble.

Page size = the smaller, the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. Keep it under 12k if you can. Keep it under 10k if you can. You're getting the idea here, right?

Remember = 80% of your surfers will be at 56K or less. Keep those preferences in mind when designing.

MVied, 50k is way over the maximum.

Junior Poster in Training

54 posts since Sep 2008

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This is what http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ had to say about my current project. Follow the link to try your website. Valuable info.

"HTML_SIZE - Congratulations, the total size of this HTML file is 8824 bytes, which less than 20K. Assuming that you specify the HEIGHT and WIDTH of your images, this size allows your page to display content in well under 8 seconds, the average time users are willing to wait for a page to display without feedback."

Junior Poster in Training

54 posts since Sep 2008

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Rofl 80% of the users on dial up? That's hilarious.

MVied

Junior Poster

112 posts since Aug 2008

Reputation Points: 21

Solved Threads: 11

Stats speak for itself. Not everyone has access to high-speed internet.
The world is bigger than just the US. Think outside the box.

Junior Poster in Training

54 posts since Sep 2008

Reputation Points: 12

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That depends on your target audience. I'm well aware that parts of the world only have dial-up. So I suppose if your target audience doesn't include the US, Japan, China, or Europe, then sure, 80% of your users might be on dial-up. Realistically if you're talking about a world-wide audience, you may have 30% on dial-up. For my websites, I generally offer a low bandwidth version that's basically a minimalistic version of the site. I do that with the older generations in mind because they don't always like the fancy designs and can't read the text, but I suppose it helps dial-up users also.

MVied

Junior Poster

112 posts since Aug 2008

Reputation Points: 21

Solved Threads: 11

Just for your information. I'm currently living in South Africa. Yesterday there was a article about a pigeon beating the internet in delivering a package. Over the distance of 80km's the pigeon reached it's goal in about 2 hours, the internet status was at 4%. That's how slow internet is here. Just informing...

Junior Poster in Training

54 posts since Sep 2008

Reputation Points: 12

Solved Threads: 2

Another thing that I think is being greatly over looked here is optimization and compression. If caching and compression is done correctly then you site can be a bit larger and still load faster than smaller pages.

valonesal

Junior Poster

121 posts since Aug 2009

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 2

The average from what I've read is under 100kb.

Depends on your customer profile. If they are in modern cities then a little larger. If they are on dialup then maybe smaller if possible.

There are also numerous tools to decrease page load times such as AJAX

newviewit.com

Junior Poster in Training

88 posts since Sep 2009

Reputation Points: 12

Solved Threads: 1

apache Mod_gzip mod_deflate will compress on the fly if enabled in apache or php headers
and browser accept headers are there

best speed tweak has been,
given that transparent.gif is a 1*1px transparent.gif image

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<!-- @(#) $Id$ -->
<head>
<title>HTML Template</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="Keywords" content="your,keywords,here" />
<meta name="Description" content="." />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<img src='fastimage.gif' id='img1' width='320' height='200' alt='image you want to display fast text'>
<!--- bla bla bla all the stuff that you want to display fast -->
<img src='transparent.gif' id='img1' width='320' height='200' alt='image1 that is not really urgent text'>
<!--- bla bla bla all the stuff that you want to display fast -->
<img src='transparent.gif' id='img2' width='320' height='200' alt='image2 that is not really urgent text'>
<!--- bla bla bla all the stuff that you want to display fast -->
<img src='transparent.gif' id='img3' width='320' height='200' alt='image3 that is not really urgent text'>
<!--- bla bla bla all the stuff that you want to display fast -->
<script type='text/javascript'>
document.getElementById('img1').src='realimage1.href';
document.getElementById('img2').src='realimage2.href';
document.getElementById('img3').src='realimage3.href';
</body>
</html>

the page loads and functions, then javascript loads images in the background and replaces blank transparent images
Images Known to be required in subsequent pages can be background loaded, while user reads this page, giving the impression that pages load faster than they really do, but nobody notices they delay because the page already works

use css effects instead of graphic effects for menus
I still see review requests on sites where a 1024*768 image is resized in html to 100*80 to be an icon, a 450KB icon, serv images at the displayed size

almostbob

Posting Sensei

3,149 posts since Jan 2009

Reputation Points: 571

Solved Threads: 376

I would like to ask webmasters, what optimal website page sizes are?

Depends where you are and your market.

If most on dial-up be simple. If ADSL, add a few bells and whistles (Flash).

I have found that front page for first should be simple. Keep Flash to inside pages, which gives option for slower viewers to wait if they want to se it. You can't afford to miss the impatient viewers who will not stay to see if your front page doesn't download in less than 20 seconds on any connection.

More importantly, on any pages make sure images are compressed for quick download.

A major problem is trying to install images of over 100KB on a page.

The web only renders 75KB as a jpg, so if you get an image that is huge in raw format, use your graphics program to resize it to an optimal image for the web and compress it to its lowest size comparable to what looks good on the screen.

You can take an image of 10MB and reduce it to 60Kb if you do it right.

That way your pages will download quickly.

Geoff Hinde

Newbie Poster

6 posts since Nov 2009

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 1